September 24, 2013

(Ed. note: This gorgeous essay came over the transom, from cocktailian and friend of the blog Susan Harlan.)

I am unpacking
my bar. Yes, I am. My bar was just delivered, and it has all the potential of a
new thing. And now I am going to fill it with old things.

This bar will
house many objects that have been in storage for the last year. These things
are hidden away in boxes that have been hidden away in warehouses. Taking
things out of boxes is like acquiring them for the first time. My dining room
floor is covered with crumpled packing paper. I am surrounded by boxes, and I
have an X-Acto knife.

I gaze on this
new bar, this gorgeous creation of chrome and wood with its vacant shelves and
mirrored back, and I know I should be unpacking more practical things. I should
probably unpack my clothes, toiletries, and dishes. But I’m not going to. I
have a whole house to unpack, but I am unpacking my bar.

I open the
doors to this bar. The inside smells deliciously of wood, but it has an
appealingly fake varnished smell, too, as if this bar of mine understands
artifice. I think of The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe, a book I never liked. The bar’s doors open onto a world
of fantasy, minus the creepy fauns and witches with candy fixations.

There’s
something sad about the end of unpacking, so you don’t want to unpack too
quickly. You want to draw out the process – to live a bit longer amongst the
mysterious things in bleached packing paper. And so I take my time. I unwrap a
set of gray glass tumblers decorated with signs of the zodiac. I unwrap a pink
flamingo tumbler and pour myself a bourbon. The little pink guy looks content
against the brown of the bourbon.

The pink
flamingo is a very retro bird. The bird of choice of John Waters. I have two
pink flamingos in my yard; they are named Patsy and Edina. But the pink
flamingo is particularly suited to a bar, as is the penguin. They are both boozy
birds. I unwrap my penguin cocktail shaker. His head is tilted ever so slightly
in the air, as if he is a proud penguin butler, a figure invested in elegance
and order. (He is wearing a tie, of course.) I unwrap a silver orb-shaped ice
bucket with a parade of penguins marching all in line. These penguins seem worn
out by life; they trudge along, slightly slouched. They are penguins of the
working day. The orb ice bucket is very mid-century; it oozes sixties-ness. And
next to the owl, the penguin is the most mid-century of fowl, but the owl has
more of a punch bowl physique. And as penguins can’t fly and are not considered
particularly wise, they can take comfort in their established place in bar
culture.

Some people
think of objects as real – almost as living things, or at least as the
non-living means by which we make manifest our lives. Others think that there
is something unsavory about this sentiment – that it is a kind of false
worship. But those who feel the life of things take it for granted that this
is how it is, and it seems impossible that one could feel any other way.

I unpack
swizzle sticks and straws. Swizzle sticks with orange and black spheres at
their ends. Marbled straws. Straws striped in red and yellow. Straws printed
like the bark of birch trees. One should always have things that one does not
use. I have two mini-olive skewers for martinis with plastic olives on their
ends. They are pretty, and they serve no real purpose.

I am unpacking
my bar, and there is a lot to unpack. A rhinestone-encrusted golden elephant
bottle stopper. A small stack of linen cocktail napkins embroidered with ladies
in large skirts.

I rip open another
box. Gifts. A monogrammed mint julep cup my friends gave me for performing
their wedding ceremony. In another box, I find the cocktail shaker they gave
me, in which I have mixed virtually every cocktail I’ve ever served. I find a
white ceramic bottle stopper in the shape of a dog (the stopper part makes up
the upper half of the pooch’s body and his head.) Some of my favorite people to
drink with gave me this dog. And I come across my bluebird bottle stopper from
a friend in New York. That little guy doubles as a candle-holder: he is an
over-achieving bottle-stopper. Multi-tasking.

So many
glasses. I arrange them in neat rows on the shelves. I unwrap an old PanAm
tumbler. Some friends gave it to me when they lived here, but now they have
moved away. I like the little PanAm icon on the glass. It suggests a glamorous
era of air travel – a time when people sat back in wide seats and sipped
cocktails while a semi-magical, gorgeous machine cut through blue skies. I
unwrap a Cachaca glass from a Brazilian restaurant where I had my thirtieth
birthday. It was not a happy birthday, but the glass makes me happy now. It has
a cheeky-looking crustacean on it.

Glasses
decorated with ferry boats or four-leaf clovers or acorns. Foxes. The devil. A
whale – that elusive creature. Glasses with stems and silver rims. Glasses that
are rounded, squared, heavy, light.

These glasses
promise future evenings with friends. They recall past evenings. Over the
summer, I drove across the country to work in Los Angeles for a month. It was
an alien place – in some ways a lonely place, a place where I felt trapped in
my car or trapped in my temporary home. In the evenings, I walked my dog around
the quiet residential streets of my neighborhood, and I listened for the sounds
of parties or get-togethers. Silence. I looked for extra cars on the street.
Nothing. The turning in of the American
family, a friend said to me recently.

People used to
have bars in their houses, sometimes built into their houses. Bars turn out.

I unwrap a set
of coupe glasses. I love the way a coupe glass feels in your hand. Everyone
says they’re terrible for drinking champagne as they let all the bubbles escape,
but I don’t care. Nick & Nora glasses. Glasses from flea markets and from vast,
disorganized antique malls. Glasses printed with leaves and flowers. I set a solitary
little cordial glass on the middle shelf and stand back and survey the scene. The
bar is starting to resemble a cabinet of curiosities.

I come across
things that I have bought for myself. A narrow, elegant blown-glass pitcher. A tumbler
with a nice, heavy bottom that I found at a store on Block Island last summer.
The shop also sold fishing tackle and rain gear. The glass has the shape of the
island etched into it, an abstract white shape on the clear glass. If you don’t
know what it is, you wouldn’t know what it is. I unwrap another tumbler with a gleaming
Statue of Liberty superimposed right in the center of the city’s skyline. “New
York,” it proclaims. I think I found that one here in North Carolina. I come
across my favorite vintage cocktail shaker printed with colorful Paris
monuments – Moulin Rouge! Ballets de
Paris! L’Opera de Paris! – and drinks recipes: Tom Collins, Martini, On the Rocks, Old Fashioned. On the Rocks suggests that you take a
bit of liquor and put it over ice.

I set a small
book of Fitzgerald’s writings entitled On
Booze on the lower bar shelf. I like the way it looks – it’s a slim, clean
white book – but I’m not convinced he knew all that much about drinking. He’s a
mythic boozy figure, like Dorothy Parker, but to me there is always something
cold about Fitzgerald, like the flickering diamonds of his depicted worlds.
Plato is a warmer model. He understood that friendships are forged by boozing.
And he understood that thinking and drinking are suited to one another.

I finish my
bourbon and walk into the kitchen and rinse out the pink flamingo glass, and
then I dry it off and put it back on the top shelf of the bar. Now I just have
to gather up all the paper and the boxes and throw them away. I look over the
shelves. There is no more room. And so I close the doors.

Susan Harlan is a professor of English literature and an avid cocktailian. She also enjoys drinking on the move, as she chronicles in her travel blog Born on a Train.

August 24, 2013

I've had some pretty good drinks in the past couple weeks, and wanted to showcase cocktails from three of the more interesting places I've had them.

Thursday night, I had the Summer Silk (formerly the "Maïs d'Été") at Marseille in Manhattan, as part of their Corn Festival -- all the restaurants in the Tour de France Restaurant Group were celebrating sweet corn this week, one of my favorite parts of any summer. The menu includes several corn-based dishes (I greatly enjoyed the charred corn salad and the roasted scallops with jalapeno-corn mousseline and popcorn beurre blanc), but also features two corn drinks. Aviram Turgeman, Beverage Director for the Tour de France Restaurant Group, told me that since the chefs were featuring corn in their menus, he thought he'd come up with a corn-based cocktail.

The Summer Silk is a bourbon sour, and I thought the most interesting twist was that the drink is sweetened with a housemade corn-silk syrup -- not the high-fructose variety that sweetens sodas and the like, but a simple syrup that tastes like just-picked sweet corn. Turgeman said that he originally experimented with corn purees, but that "the starchiness of the corn in a puree almost gave it a dairy consistency" that was undesirable in a drink. Going back to the drawing board, he "basically took the silk from the husk and cooked it with water and sugar. And surprisingly enough, the syrup smells and tastes like freshly-boiled corn. Mixing that with bourbon, which is made mostly of corn, was a given to me. The oloroso sherry is in the drink mainly to give it an oxidated note, and it's a way to facilitate the alcohol there; I could have gone with 2 oz. bourbon, but the bourbon would have dominated it, and I wanted to give it a little more roundness and nuttiness. The pineapple juice gives it the texture and the froth, and the Peychaud's bitters were because they're all-American, just like the corn." The drink's garnished with a few caramelized popcorn kernels, another unusual touch: "I tried to slice the cob and make a wheel on the edge of the glass as a garnish, but that was a little over the top, and I wanted an edible garnish", Turgeman noted.

I didn't quite find the sherry flavor in there, but I get that it modifies the drink, and it does kind of harmonize the various moving parts. Turgeman noted that he has to be careful when he makes the syrup, because some batches come out with more or less corn flavor, so he reduces it as necessary to make the sweetness and corn flavor consistent across the batches.

Summer Silk

1 1/2 oz. Woodford Reserve bourbon

1 oz. housemade corn silk syrup*

3/4 oz. fresh lemon juice

1/2 oz. pineapple juice

1/2 oz. Lustau oloroso sherry

Shake well with ice and double-strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and finish with 3-4 small dashes of Peychaud's bitters floated atop the froth. Float 2-3 caramelized popcorn kernels as a garnish.

*Corn Silk Syrup

Combine 1 quart (400g) fresh corn silk, 1 quart water, and 1 quart sugar, and stir occasionally while bringing to a boil. Once boiled, lower the temperature to a very low simmer for 5 minutes, then remove from stove, cover with foil for 30 minutes, strain into a clean container and label. The liquid should be amber and smell like corn, and will keep in the refrigerator for 2 days.

Turgeman also came up with a non-alcoholic corn-mint lemonade which I didn't try, but which sounds good: place 10 fresh mint leaves in a mixing glass, add 1 1/4 oz. of the corn-silk syrup, and muddle well. Add 1 oz. fresh lemon juice, 1 1/2 oz. cold water, and 1/2 oz. pineapple juice. Shake well with ice, and strain into an ice-filled highball glass. Garnish with a mint leaf sandwiched between two caramelized corn kernels on a cocktail pick and serve with a straw.

The Corn Festival ends after tonight, but Turgeman says the Summer Silk and Corn-Mint Lemonade will both be available at Marseille and Cafe d'Alsace for at least a few more weeks, until the end of summer.

August 04, 2013

It's surprisingly not too swelter-y in New York City at the moment, given that it's August. I'll take it, though. This blog's co-authors are about to decamp to triple-digit-temperature Las Vegas for TCONA, though, so I'm sure we'll be in need of some refreshment. (Recommend any places? Drop a comment or a Tweet our way.)

And Dolin is launching a génépy (aka génépi -- a juniper liqueur) in the US. Can't wait to try theirs. I lugged a bottle of a small producer's génépi back from the French Alps once and greatly enjoyed it.

Departuressays the speakeasy concept is dead, in their rundown of ten New York cocktail bars. (Jim Meehan begstodiffer, pointing out that hospitality can take many different forms, and concluding that "the community needs to rally around diversity of concepts and styles and support each other." Hear hear.)

July 30, 2013

Can you believe that Mixology Monday is 75 installments old this month? Paul Clarke's fantastic idea has sparked tons of creative cocktail recipes and writing over the years, and I really should participate more often -- the deadline and structure are wonderful for getting lazy bloggers like me a-tinkering, and it's always neat to see tons of riffs on the same basic theme. This month's host is book-writin', cocktail-creatin' machine Frederic Yarm over at Cocktail Virgin Slut, and he's set for us the theme of "Flip Flop": "Find a recipe, either new or old, and switch around at least two of the ingredients to sister or cousin ingredients but holding the proportions and some of the ingredients the same. The new recipe should be recognizable as a morph of the old one when viewed side by side."

As Jordan Devereaux notes at Chemistry of the Cocktail, "what's amazing about the Mai Tai is how adaptable it is to other spirits." If you use bourbon instead of rums, you can get a Honi Honi, for instance. However, one distinctive feature of the Mai Tai recipe is its combination of two different rums to achieve the desired effect. (This strikes me as a classic Tiki technique.) This blending approach pays off when you shake up the spirit selection. So if you take that Honi Honi and split the bourbon called for there into equal parts bourbon and bonded rye (and switch the lime to a more bourbon-friendly lemon), you get a Bluegrass Mai Tai, which sounds like a much more varied, richer drink. A Mai Tai made with tequila (or is it a Margarita spiked with orgeat?) is a Pinky Gonzalez, invented by Trader Vic in 1964. And, our host this month even raised the bar with a Sherry Mai Tai, employing an Amontillado and a Pedro Ximénez -- I can't even picture this one and want to take a whack at it.

I attended a Tiki Monday a while back that was sponsored by Brooklyn Gin, and I was looking forward to the possibilities of more gin tiki drinks. Of course, Tiki Mondays impresario Brian Miller created the fantastic (and fantastically complex) Winchester, which he characterizes as "a gin Zombie." Miller and this blog's favorite bartender, Brooklyn Gin's Damon Dyer, served up all sorts of interesting drinks, and I had enough of them that, well, I don't really remember what I had. But it did inspire me to try my hand at mixing several different gins together in a quest for a juniper-y Mai Tai. After some trial and error, I landed on this combination of malty Bols genever, citrusy Brooklyn Gin, and a rum-based orange liqueur. And the name? That comes from what I said the first time I tried this.

July 09, 2013

Bubbles are awesome. Who could argue? I drink a lot -- a lot -- of seltzer, because it's way more interesting than tap water. I probably go through about a liter a day, just for personal consumption -- more if I'm making fizzy cocktails. At 2.2 pounds per liter bottle, that's a lot of heavy bottles to haul up the stairs of my fourth-floor walkup, to say nothing of the amount of plastic I'd buy from the grocery store, the pollution caused by the trucks who deliver it the store, et cetera. And while I'm a history and nostalgia buff, I'm not quite up for paying Walter the Seltzer Man or the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys to deliver me glass siphons. (It would certainly be cool, but it's hard enough getting the Postal Service to deliver to my building.) So I do as increasing numbers of people do and make my own fizzy water. Ever since Dave Arnold showed me how he makes his, I've been hooked.

Yeah, you can get a SodaStream setup practically anywhere, starting at about eighty bucks, and they do make fine seltzer. It's fantastic to have an unlimited supply of bubbles in your kitchen or at your desk. Their footprint is small, and the design is sleek. The company is doing land-office business and expanding rapidly. But, there are a few drawbacks. The proprietary carbonator capsules that the SodaStream runs on cost about $35 for a new carbonator holding enough gas to carbonate 60 liters of seltzer. (That's for a spare; a new SodaStream soda maker comes with a carbonator capsule included.) When that runs out, it costs about $15 to exchange an empty carbonator for a full one at a SodaStream retailer. Some models run on 130-liter carbonators. This seems like a hassle to me, and an expensive one. (You can hack your SodaStream to run on a paintball canister, but this will run you at least $60 and swaps one hassle for another.)

So: how do I do it? Easy. I have a carbon dioxide tank, with a regulator and some hoses. I use an adaptor that connects the gas line to a plastic bottle, and that's it.

I started by picking up a new ten-pound aluminum CO2 cylinder tank. You can use whatever size you like, but for me a ten-pound tank was a nice sweet spot between portability, heft, and not having to refill it much. ("ten pounds" here refers to the weight of the gaseous CO2 in the tank, not the weight of the tank itself, which is more.) I also liked that the ten-pound tank has a plastic handle on the top, which definitely helps in moving it around. You can get steel tanks, and you can certainly find used ones for cheap. (One caveat is that used tanks have to pass leak tests; here's a good rundown of cylinder markings.) Shop around -- since they're heavy, you may want to pay attention to shipping costs. I got my tank from BeverageFactory.com, where it ran me $83 with $18 in shipping from California to New York City. (As of this writing, they're going for $85 with $21 in shipping.) It's 20.5" tall with a 7" diameter, and my girlfriend kindly allows me to keep it in a corner of the kitchen.

You'll need a gas regulator, too, to knock the gas down from tank pressure to dispensing pressure, not to mention hoses, hose clamps, and gas fittings. (You want a "ball-lock" fitting, which is the type of connection that beer kegs use.) You can absolutely find these components separately, but I decided to spend a tad more and get a set that was already hooked up. From KegConnection.com, I purchased their "Soda Carbonating Kit" for $70. This consists of a two-gauge KegConnection.com-branded regulator with an overpressure relief valve, and a hose attached to its barb. The other end of the hose has a ball-lock gas connector already attached to it. Since I hadn't messed around with pressurized gas before, I thought it best to let the pros attach all that stuff for me ahead of time.

I also added a spare carbonater [sic] cap for $15. This is the all-important adapter between a plastic bottle's threads and the gas fitting, and it'll fit on a one-liter, two-liter, or even a 20-ounce bottle. Shipping on this order was a flat $8. (Some people have hacked together their own carbonator cap for even cheaper, using a Schrader tire valve stem inserted into a hole drilled into a soda bottle cap, but I decided to pay a little more for convenience instead of building my own cap. The carbonater cap has a rubber O-ring and a spring-loaded poppet valve so it can seal the bottle tightly against gas leaks.)

When everything arrived, I took the tank over to my local gas dealer and paid $19 to fill it with CO2. (Fire extinguisher suppliers, welding-supply houses, and lots of other places will sell you CO2. Even paintball or aquarium stores!) Got it home, and got a-carbonatin'. Fill a plastic soda bottle (you want a soda bottle, i.e., one that's designed to handle pressure, or it could burst dangerously and messily) to about the shoulder mark. Squeeze out all the air space, and put the carbonater cap on. Get your liquid cold -- remember Boyle's Law from high school? The lower the temperature of your liquid, the more gas you can get to dissolve into it -- and you're ready to carbonate. Attach the ball-lock fitting to the carbonater cap, making sure the spring-loaded collar snaps home and it's all the way on. Open the valve on the CO2 tank, and the gauges will come alive to show you how much gas is left in the tank and the pressure of the outgoing gas. (You can easily adjust the level of carbonation in your finished drink by changing the outgoing gas pressure on the regulator.) Open the valve on the downstream side of the regulator, and the bottle will inflate with a loud pop. Shake the bottle for sixty seconds or so, to increase the surface area of the liquid that's in contact with the gas, and that's it. Close up all your valves, put the bottle in the fridge to settle down, and pour yourself a nice drink.

So yes, the start-up costs are higher than a SodaStream, but the curves converge when you take ongoing expenses into account. My local grocery store sells its store brand seltzer for $0.40 a liter, making it $120 for 300 liters -- roughly a bottle a day, six days a week, for a year. (That's also 660 pounds of water to haul the four flights of stairs to my apartment.) The cheapest Sodastream is $80 (and most are around $100), plus exchanging four carbonator capsules to carbonate a total of 300 liters of water will come to around $60. So with Sodastream, you're spending $140 for the same amount of seltzer, and an additional $60/year in operating expenses. I spent $213 on my rig, including shipping and CO2, and my ten-pound tank will theoretically carbonate around 500 liters of very fizzy seltzer, with only a $19 cost to refill it with CO2. And, as I noted, it's a lot more fun to experiment with this stuff on your own with a machine you've assembled yourself. And you can fizzify anything you want to!

November 27, 2012

I'm trying something a little different here, and putting together the first-ever Cocktailians Holiday Gift Guide. This is basically a listing of interesting things that you, or I, or a cocktailian you know, might like to get in their stocking this year. (And no one's paid anything to get on here -- all these products are things that I've either bought for myself, or I haven't tried them but think they look interesting enough to buy or recommend to others. Exceptions (Chopin rye vodka, To Have And Have Another) noted in tooltips.)

And, if all this drinking stuff has left you a little peaked, I can also recommend great coffee from Tonx, which'll send you expertly-sourced and freshly-roasted beans every other week. (You can get a free trial here.) Or give an early gift with a ticket to the New York Distilling Company's Sandy benefit on Repeal Day, next Wednesday, December 5th: you get to see some night distilling in action, you'll get half a bottle of new make rye, half a bottle of the rye after it finishes aging, and the chance to win your own personalized 5-gallon barrel of rye. If you want to get some art and help out a great bar which was hit hard by Sandy, St. John Frizell's Fort Defiance is offering "junk bonds": gift certificates costing double their face value, each decorated with a different bartender's portrait. What a great idea!

...or wait, you were looking for a Holiday .GIF Guide instead? Tonx has you covered there, too.

also over at Serious Drinks, Michael Dietsch gives us a superlative guide to rye. Pay special attention to his descriptions of the various LDI/MGP ryes made in Lawrenceburg, Indiana -- an undercovered bit of information that most consumers don't know about;

Both Jim Beam and Jack Daniel's have recently released white whiskeys, or rather spirits...and Chuck Cowdery is on the case, noting that the Jack Daniel's Tennessee Rye calls itself a "neutral spirit" despite not meeting the TTB's definition (which requires distillation at > 190° proof/95% abv.) But because it hasn't touched wood, it can't be called a "whiskey", also per the TTB. He hears from Jack Daniel's -- which doesn't shed much light on it; why would you want to sell something as "neutral spirit" if you're not forced to label it as such? -- and from the Feds, who point out that it's properly classified as "a distilled spirits specialty product" or "spirits distilled from grain." Will the Not-So-Old No. 7 have to change its label? Stay tuned;

Zagat also runs down the 10 Most Annoying Cocktail Trends, only some of which I agree with. What in the world's wrong with coupes? Or classic drinks? Or bars in expensive cities charging enough to pay the rent and their staff?;

Have you made or drunk a Last Word? Do you read cocktail blogs or participate in the cocktail renaissance? (Rhetorical question, that.) What you enjoy now is in no small part due to the efforts of Seattle's Murray Stenson, and he needs your help. Do help him out -- I want him well and back behind the stick, so I can visit him in Seattle.

October 19, 2012

Co-author of the blog and all-around great guy Tony Hightower got married last weekend (to frequent Guest Star and all-around great gal Joanna Scutts), and the happy couple requested yours truly to come up with some drinks for the reception.

We put our heads and palates together, did some brainstorming, some tasting, some trial and error, and came up with three different drinks, all in different styles. To wit:

The couple loooooves Negronis -- the bride named it as her favorite drink -- and they have sophisticated friends who aren't afraid of things like Campari. Something from the boozy & bitter kingdom was a definite must, and after some tasting, we settled on the Boulevardier. It's kind of a cross between a Manhattan and a Negroni, but more to the point, it's a fantastic, classic, and potent cocktail; first described. as far as I can tell, in Harry McElhone's Barflies and Cocktails, a wonderfully breezy and fun volume published in 1927 by the Harry of Harry's New York Bar in Paris. It's an obvious variation on the Old Pal -- described by the same Harry in a separate book five years earlier -- except that it switches rye to bourbon and dry vermouth to sweet. McElhone describes the recipe as originating with one Erskine Gwynne, though, a playboy, prankster, and Vanderbilt scion who edited a Parisian literary magazine called The Boulevardier. As Toby Cecchini notes in the Times, Richard Knapp of Mother's Ruin cuts the Campari by half and adds some homemade pecan orgeat, which makes it a wonderfully voluptuous, drink with some sweet smoothness. Similarly, Locale in Astoria, Queens, which hosted the rehearsal dinner, has a "Writer's Block" on the menu, which is essentially a Boulevardier with a brandy brown-sugar butter reduction added...and it's delicious, if a little sweet and heavy on the Christmas spices.

For the wedding, though, we went with a straight Boulevardier, easily batched for serving lots of thirsty guests. The only changes we made were to double the bourbon, as Cecchini recommended, making it a much more balanced drink, and to rename it to reflect the wedding party's origins:

The Queen Elizabeth Way (né Boulevardier)

2 oz. bourbon

1 oz. Campari

1 oz. sweet vermouth

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled glass. (I like to garnish these with an orange twist, preferably flamed. But we didn't bother for the reception.)

We also wanted to come up with an original cocktail, and since the QEW was boozy and bitter, decided to go for a crisper sour to offer guests another option. I'd been thinking about tea-infused simple syrup ever since having the #1, a great tea-based cocktail at Whitehall. (Dave Arnold also serves up a similar tea-infused vodka sour at Booker & Dax, though he uses a milk-punch technique to detanninize the vodka and a centrifuge operating at 4,000rpm to remove the milk solids.)

My approach was simpler: infuse hot simple syrup with Earl Grey tea, as I'm a bergamot nut and thought it'd go well with gin's botanicals. A gin sour made with the syrup was good, but didn't have enough tea oomphiness, so I thought about infusing the gin as well, and that worked out well. Tony suggested the name for this as a good marriage of England and Canada: the gin is English, and the Grey Cup is awarded to the CFL championship team. (And just to complete the circle, the Grey Cup was donated by Albert Grey, Governor-General of Canada and 4th Earl Grey, whose great-uncle Charles Grey gave his name to the tea.)

Earl Grey Cup

2 oz. tea-infused gin*

1/2 oz. tea syrup**

1/2 oz. lemon juice

Brut Champagne or other bubbly

Shake the tea-infused gin and the tea syrup together with the lemon juice. Strain into a chilled glass and top with bubbly (2 oz. or so.)

*Tea-infused Gin: Infuse several teabags of Earl Grey tea (I used both the Stash Double Bergamot and Barry's) into gin (preferably Beefeater) for 10 minutes or so, or until the gin has a strong tea flavor but isn't overly tannic.

**Tea Syrup: Make rich simple syrup at a 2:1 sugar:water ratio, and add Earl Grey teabags to the hot simple syrup for 5-7 minutes, or until the syrup has a strong tea flavor.

(I'd earlier tried to come up with a good drink involving ingredients from Canada and England, but wasn't successful: I've had good maple liqueurs from Canada, but they would be hard to source without costing an arm and a leg. And while I love English gin, I don't tend to like Canadian whisky, with its neutral-spirit content. And the idea of a Pimm's-screech hybrid is better left untried, we thought.)

Our third drink offered at the reception was a punch, and just about my favorite punch at that. It's simple and very quick to put together, and you can batch the shrub ahead of time to make service easier. David Wondrich, the scribe of punch and the recipe's creator, notes that it's a crowd pleaser that "people consume in shocking amounts." (True; we prepared four batches for the wedding and they went pretty quickly)

Pour the shrub into a clean 750 ml bottle. Fill the rest of the bottle with water, seal, and refrigerate.

To serve, pour the shrub into a punch bowl, add another 750 ml bottle of cold water and a bottle of Irish whiskey (preferably pot-stilled, but good ol' Jameson will do), add a 1 1/2 quart block of ice, and grate nutmeg over the top. Serves 20.

The three drinks seemed to work their magic and get the guests -- not least your humble author -- completely splifficated. (Why do you think it took me several days to write this?) And, of course, all of the Cocktailians wish Tony & Jo the very best. Thanks to Kristina Kaufman for the photos.

September 13, 2012

Here are some things we've found along the byways of the World Wide Web, usually while we're in our cups:

Friend of the blog Marshall from Scofflaw's Den sends word that two of his drinks are in a cocktail/mocktail contest. You should vote for them. Not just because they're friends of the blog, but: non-alcoholic gin from a nitrous infuser! Mixed with beet juice! And another drink with pineapple-infused tequila and long pepper syrup! Neat-sounding stuff. You can vote till 11:30p PDT (no, not that PDT) tonight. So DO EET.

So apparently some joint called the Flatiron Room is opening up. Um. Do they not know about, or are they hoping to capitalize on confusing arising from the name of, the Flatiron Lounge, a spectacularly good bar that's been open for almost a decade, six blocks away?! And who do these jokers think they are, anyway? WTF?

They also have recently profiled a front-of-house person: Pegu Club GM Robert Oppenheimer. (There are many reasons why Pegu remains one of my most-favorite places to tipple in town. The superb staff is one of them.)

Interesting NYT story on folks in Kentucky who don't like the ethanol-loving black fungus that lives near distilleries, so they're suing major distilleries Brown-Forman, Heaven Hill, Diageo, Buffalo Trace, and Jim Beam. The stuff's been around forever, and Baudoinia compniacensis was first described in the 1870s. (Even the scientific name shows off its origins: "compniacensis" means "from Cognac.") I noticed it all over the sides of warehouses when I visited the Kentucky Bourbon Trail a few years ago, and Chuck Cowdery notes: "The fungus is well known and generally regarded as harmless, if a bit of a nuisance. It can be removed with a little soap and water. Typically, all a distillery neighbor has to do is ask and the distillery will send a cleaning crew at no charge. It is extremely doubtful that any complainant bought their house before the accused distillery was built." Cowdery also points out that the stuff is pretty similar to common mildew, and decries the NIMBYism of people not wanting to live near distilleries;

Anyway, a slightly-different Isaac already rolled through New Orleans -- at Tales of the Cocktail last month, DiSaronno and Tia Maria brought TV's most iconic bartender, Ted Lange, to their "Guilty Pleasures" tasting room at the Royal Sonesta Hotel. Amaretto is a crowd-pleaser and, truth be told, kind of a punch line among cocktail geeks -- see Jeffrey Morgenthaler's "I Make The Best Amaretto Sour In The World" post, in which he amps it up with cask-strength bourbon -- and conjures up mental images of fern bars populated with aggressive hair, shoulder pads, and little black dresses.

DiSaronno had fun with it, though, and turned their tasting room into a real party, saying that their mission is to "bring fun back into bartending." And it really was a great time -- '80s music (good '80s music!) was pumping, people were dancing and grinding, bicycle-powered blenders were whipping up drinks, and flair bartending ace Tobin Ellis was mixing up Amaretto Sours. (Good ones, too, and I say that as someone who's generally not into nut-flavored liqueurs.) As far as Tia Maria goes, I have no idea why it doesn't have a higher profile. It's one of the big two coffee liqueurs, of course, and while both Kahlúa and Tia Maria contain vanilla, I feel that Tia Maria's vanilla note is more pronounced.

Ted Lange himself was working the room, posing for pictures and talking up the sponsor's products. He was incredibly nice and friendly to your reporter, and took a moment to chat. He filled me in on his long and interesting career: his first screen appearance was in the Wattstax documentary in 1973, he made his Broadway debut in "Hair", and yes, he's still close friends with Gavin MacLeod. Lange wrote and directed several episodes while working on "The Love Boat", and has been a screenwriter, playwright, and director since. His latest play, "Lady Patriot", premieres September 7 at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles.

He told me that one of his earliest acting lessons, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, was to be wholly present in the moment, and to serve those around you -- which isn't too far from the philosophy underlying the work of any good bartender, he observed. (He told Robert Simonson of the New York Times that he'd gone to bartending school after the first season of "The Love Boat", so he could brush up on some of the basics.) He works in the drama field, but Lange disdains personal drama, mentioning that he's fired more well-known actors from projects he's helmed in favor of less-well-known actors who could get the job done and not create negative energy on the set. He mentioned that everyone's on the same side in a play or a movie/TV set, and that if people aren't willing to work together for the common goal, there's no reason to put up with their drama. "Life's better when everyone has fun", he noted, and drew the comparison with bartending, where the goal is to please the guest and make sure everyone has a good time.